Children Who Survived Fire in Guatemala Are Still Not Safe, Report Says

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People carried the coffin containing the remains of Madelyn Patricia Hernandez Hernandez, 14, who died in a fire at the Virgen de la Asunción children’s home near Guatemala City.CreditMoises Castillo/Associated Press

MEXICO CITY — The most severely disabled children were moved to an institution where 43 of them were housed together in one room. Many of the 130 children brought to a special education school had psychiatric and other problems, and the school’s staff quickly found itself overwhelmed.

And all the youngsters had just lived through a terrifying experience — a fire that killed 40 girls at the Virgen de la Asunción children’s home near Guatemala City.

Those were among the details in a report to be published on Wednesday by Disability Rights International, an advocacy organization in Washington whose representatives had gone on a scheduled trip to Guatemala to visit the home and other institutions when the disaster occurred last Wednesday.

The rush to place children in new facilities after the fire put them at risk of suffering the same abuse they endured at the home, the report said, because the new institutions were unprepared to take them.

“These institutions are the last place you would want to put a child who survived trauma,” Matthew Mason, the clinical director of the Georgetown University Center for Child and Human Development and a member of Disability Rights International’s team, said in the report.

“These are the dumping grounds of society, for people who are not wanted by society, whether they are disabled or gay or happen to get there through the criminal justice system,” Eric Rosenthal, the organization’s executive director, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday.

The fire broke out after a group of residents who had escaped from the home were rounded up by the police and brought back. Investigators have said that they believe the girls who died were locked in a small room as punishment. Mr. Rosenthal said that boys interviewed at the home last week said that they had been part of the breakout and that afterward they had been locked up and beaten.

Allegations that children and adolescents had been abused at Virgen de la Asunción had been public since 2013, when Guatemala’s human rights ombudsman declared that the residents’ rights were being systematically violated.

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Children who survived a fire at a Guatemalan children’s home last week after being transferred to a new center, known as ABI.CreditDisability Rights International

Last year, the ombudsman called on the government to shut down the center, where 700 young people were housed, and asked the attorney general to investigate claims that some residents had been sexually abused and forced into prostitution in Guatemala City.

On Monday, the authorities arrested the former minister of social welfare, Carlos Rodas Mejía, the former deputy minister, Anahí Keller Zabala, and the home’s former director, Santos Torres Ramírez. They were charged with culpable homicide, negligence and child abuse. All three resigned or were dismissed after the fire.

Last week, Mr. Rosenthal and his team raced to keep track of the disabled residents who were moved out.

They said they found alarming evidence of the severe neglect resulting from Guatemala’s policy of institutionalization, a policy that has been repeatedly criticized by advocacy groups.

According to the report, the most disabled children were dropped off at the residential home, known as ABI, and “left to spend their days lying on mats, tied to metal doors, or belted into wheelchairs.”

At the special education school, Alida España de Arana, the teachers reported that the children from Virgen de la Asunción were “shouting, screaming and hitting each other,” and with few resources and no medical records, they had little choice but to medicate them.

The rest of the residents who were housed at Virgen de la Asunción have been moved to other facilities across the country. Health Ministry officials told Disability Rights International that seven of the girls were pregnant.

Many of the children at the home were abandoned; others had been placed there by their families. Last year, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities called on Guatemala to end the institutionalization of children.

But without any support from the government, families often have no choice. “It’s absolutely a question of political will,” Mr. Rosenthal said. “It never occurs to them that kids should be with their families.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Child Survivors of Fire Still Unsafe, Group Says. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe